Vigilantes

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  She had just downloaded AutoLearn for Armstrong’s local laws when the coroner’s van landed where the ambulance had been.

  The van was blue and larger than any vehicle she had seen so far on the Moon. The back double doors opened and the coroner emerged. He was a slight man, with curly hair and a petulant lower lip.

  He wore a whitish uniform that identified him as Brodeur, so she looked him up while she watched and discovered he was Ethan Brodeur, who had been with the coroner’s office for ten years.

  That little detail, at least, made her calm down.

  “What the hell is this all about?” Brodeur snapped at the attendant. “Where’s your vehicle?”

  “It left an hour ago.” The attendant’s voice was calm, but his cheeks were growing red. “And don’t yell at me. These good people—lawyers all—had called in the emergency over two hours ago. We got here as fast as we could, but no one else is responding.”

  “What is wrong with the Armstrong PD?” Brodeur asked. He snapped his fingers and a younger man emerged from the back of the van, carrying some equipment.

  “Um, that’s the issue,” the attendant said. “I’m going to send you security footage from this building.”

  Seng nodded despite herself. That was what the attendant should have done. She hoped he used a secure link, something the Armstrong Police Department couldn’t access easily.

  But that wasn’t her problem, at least, not at the moment.

  Brodeur started in shock, gave the attendant a sharp look, and then shook his head once.

  “Well,” Brodeur said. “That explains it.”

  “Explains what?” the attendant asked.

  “Why I got the call from APD.” Brodeur smiled wryly. His gaze swept the area, meeting Seng’s for just a moment, as if he wanted her to hear what he was going to say next. “They don’t like me in the police department. They actively try to keep me off cases.”

  Seng let out a small breath.

  “What does that mean?” Rosen whispered to her.

  She shook her head, trying to silence him. She had an idea. She suspected they didn’t like this coroner because his exams didn’t hold up in court, the police felt he was doing a sloppy job, or because he had caught the police doing something shady in the past.

  She voted for competence. Because the coroner was aware that the police didn’t like him, which incompetents usually didn’t notice.

  Still, she made a note.

  “You don’t need me anymore, right?” the attendant said. “I mean, I shouldn’t have been here anyway, but someone had to keep an eye on this crime scene.”

  “You did a good job,” Brodeur said, then patted the attendant on the arm. The gesture probably hadn’t been meant as patronizing, but it was.

  Brodeur didn’t notice the attendant’s grimace. Brodeur was already looking at the body.

  He crouched beside it, holding a position that allowed Seng to see what was going on. The ambulance attendant half-walked, half-ran down the sidewalk. He was probably going to catch one of the local trains that ran a few blocks from here.

  No one except Seng watched him go. Then she turned her attention back to Brodeur.

  “Never seen anything like it,” Brodeur was saying to his assistant. “The cops aren’t like that in this city.”

  The assistant, a young man with jug ears and a large nose that could have used some judicious cropping, clearly hadn’t seen the footage. He looked confused.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  Brodeur was taking imagery of the body, passing his hands over it, getting in situ stills. Seng hadn’t seen a technique like that since she worked in New York, years ago.

  “Don’t you recognize this guy?” Brodeur’s voice rose. He wanted all three lawyers to hear this. What was he about? “He’s the one who came to the station, and to our office, with injunctions.”

  “He works for the clones?” The assistant looked down at Zhu as if he had some kind of plague. “Is that why the cops won’t come to the murder site?”

  “I don’t know what they’re thinking,” Brodeur said, “but this guy sure didn’t make any friends in Armstrong.”

  Then he stood and grabbed something that looked like a pipette from the equipment bag. Seng had no idea what the pipette thing was, only that Brodeur seemed to think it important.

  He looked over his shoulder, his gaze meeting hers again.

  “Those clones tried to kill everyone in this dome,” he said, and it seemed like he was speaking directly to her. To remind her? To warn her? To let her know he was on the side of the cops, even though they didn’t like him?

  “That’s not going to interfere with your work, is it?” Vigfusson snapped, as if he had been part of the conversation all along.

  Brodeur looked over at him. “It already interfered with my work. This body wasn’t properly handled. Those two hours are going to make any prosecution difficult.”

  “We recorded everything,” Seng said. “Plus the building footage, which I’ve been routinely downloading, will also show that no one tampered with the body.”

  Brodeur raised his bushy eyebrows in surprise. “Well, then. Maybe it didn’t interfere as much as I thought.”

  He bent over the body, then used the pipette thing as if it were gathering something. Fluids, maybe? Seng didn’t know.

  After a few moments, Brodeur looked up and waved his fingers in front of his face. He was obviously looking at some kind of screen through his links. Processing the information? Checking on something?

  She threaded her fingers together, then twisted them, feeling the pain echo through her hands. The pain kept her alert.

  “Was he alive when you found him?” Brodeur asked them.

  Seng and Vigfusson both shook their heads.

  “My links said he wasn’t breathing,” Vigfusson said. “I did everything I could to revive him, but my chips—which, granted, aren’t as sophisticated as yours—believed he hadn’t been breathing long enough to prevent any kind of revival.”

  Brodeur’s lips thinned, and his eyes narrowed. “What do you use?”

  Vigfusson answered with a brand name that Seng didn’t recognize.

  “Figures,” Brodeur said, and returned to his work.

  “Hey!” Vigfusson said. “What do you mean, ‘figures’?”

  Seng’s heart was pounding.

  “I mean,” Brodeur said as he rocked back on his heels, “that you should look at who makes your cheap chips before you actually buy them. Your chip was made by an Earth-based funeral service. Their free-medical-chip business was shut down when it was determined that not only did they fail to revive an injured person, they also notified the funeral service when the person died.”

  Vigfusson looked at Seng with alarm. Her mouth was dry. She’d heard of things like that, but never paid a lot of attention. This kind of corruption had never concerned her before, so she hadn’t felt the need to focus on it.

  “I have some emergency medical training,” Vigfusson said, sounding defensive. She didn’t exactly blame him. “I thought he was gone too.”

  “Yeah,” Brodeur said, his back to them. “There are things that a good bot can do, things a good program can do, while you’re waiting for actual medical help that they don’t train you in those beginner emergency response classes.”

  Rosen looked away. Vigfusson leaned closer to the door. Seng unthreaded her fingers and wiped her hands on her skirt. She let out a small breath.

  “You’re saying he was alive when I called for help?” Seng asked, very gently.

  “Not alive, per se,” Brodeur said. “But revivable. With the right equipment and knowledgeable people.”

  Vigfusson bowed his head. Rosen had moved even farther back. But Seng gripped her knees. No wonder this coroner wasn’t popular. He was one of the most blunt public employees she had ever encountered.

  “So,” Seng asked, staring at Zhu’s body. “If he had gotten help, he would still be alive.”
>
  “Real help,” Brodeur said.

  Vigfusson winced.

  “Official help,” Seng said.

  Brodeur looked at her over his shoulder. He seemed to suddenly understand what she meant. She meant that the public services—the police, emergency responders—had failed Zhu.

  Even if the police managed to write off his attack as something that occurred because of rogue cops, the authorities wouldn’t be able to get rid of their culpability easily. Someone or someones had blocked the emergency response.

  “I didn’t say ‘official,’” Brodeur said a half minute too late.

  This bluntness of his, his ability to put his foot in something, was probably why the police didn’t like him. But she was guessing.

  “You meant it, though,” she said.

  Rosen was watching her. Vigfusson had raised his head, the color leaving his cheeks.

  “No,” Brodeur snapped. “I meant what I said. If he had gotten real help instead of some crappy designer chip, he’d be alive.”

  “Or if the emergency services hadn’t been blocked,” Seng said.

  “I don’t know that they were blocked,” Brodeur said, turning away from her. He focused on Zhu.

  Brodeur was now covering his ass. She didn’t mind. He had given her important information.

  It wouldn’t bring back Zhu, but it would guarantee a suit against the city.

  Clearly, the authorities here already hated S3. So she had nothing to lose for pursuing them for this. And everything else.

  Vigfusson, who had seemed so strong an hour ago, hadn’t noticed either movement. He seemed lost in his own reflections. He kept staring at his palm, which was probably where the bad chip resided.

  She couldn’t rely on him. So she put a hand on Rosen’s back. He started, then glanced at her, clearly terrified.

  Great. Two idiots. Still, she needed one of them, and she would take the seemingly more reliable one.

  “Make sure you continue to record this,” she said very softly. “I’m going to be right back.”

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Personal,” she muttered, letting him think she needed a bathroom or something. What she was going to do wasn’t that kind of personal. It wasn’t really personal at all.

  She was going to get in touch with her new bosses—the real ones, the ones who weren’t running a branch on the Moon, but who were running the whole company.

  It was time they knew what was going on.

  FOURTEEN

  NYQUIST WAITED UNTIL he had arrived back inside Armstrong’s dome before he tried to contact Flint. In fact, Nyquist went all the way to his apartment first, just because he couldn’t shake the dirty feeling he always seemed to get when he talked to Uzvaan.

  He showered, changed, and grabbed a Moon-grown apple from the fruit bowl in the kitchen. The apple was turning an alarming shade of dark purple, which meant that it would soon be too pulpy to eat. He didn’t care. He was hungry, and he wasn’t going to stop.

  But he did need to track down Flint.

  Nyquist sent a message along his links, hoping to find Flint. Then Nyquist took a bite from the apple, hit a brown part, and picked it out, tossing it away.

  He was unbelievably paranoid these days, even for him.

  He hadn’t wanted to contact Flint from anywhere close to the Reception Center. Nyquist was afraid he was being tracked. In fact, when the prison train transported him to the parking lot inside the dome, the first thing Nyquist did was run a systems diagnostic on all his links to make certain nothing had piggybacked on board from the prison system.

  He’d repeated the diagnostic three times so far, each time using a different diagnostic tool and a different method, double-checking his double-checks. And this was just to contact Flint. He wasn’t going to share information—not this way, anyhow.

  So far, no one at the prison had figured out that Nyquist didn’t belong there. They believed his cover story about Uzvaan being the lawyer for Ursula Palmette. Actually, Nyquist believed no one really thought about it.

  They didn’t care what happened to clones, as long as no one in charge of the prison got in trouble for anything.

  He let out a small breath, set the apple on the counter, and ran a hand over his face. He was tired and elated and upset and hopeful, all at the same time. If he took too much time to think about how he felt, he would blame it all on a lack of sleep.

  But he knew it was more than that. He was doing his best to keep an emotional distance, and he wasn’t an emotionally distant man. At some point, he would have to deal with everything he was feeling.

  He just hoped he could postpone it until the crisis—or whatever someone wanted to call all of this—had ended.

  He activated his private links, then encoded everything.

  Hey, Flint, Nyquist sent. Where the hell are you?

  Where should I be? The response seemed irritated, but Nyquist couldn’t tell. He would probably be irritated if someone contacted him that way, so he was projecting on Flint.

  Somewhere that we can talk. Nyquist was feeling so paranoid that he didn’t even want to say he had information. He’d gotten warrants on less.

  I’m at my office. Is this important? Should we bring in Noelle?

  Nyquist shook his head before he remembered that the visuals weren’t on. He would talk to DeRicci later. First, he wanted to talk with Flint.

  This is just between us, Nyquist sent, then realized how mysterious that sounded. Still, he was going to stick with it.

  I’ll be waiting for you, Flint sent, and signed off.

  Nyquist grabbed the apple. He’d been up for hours, and the apple had shown him just how hungry he was. He would pick up some food on the way to see Flint. No one was eating well lately, and Nyquist was beginning to see it as his mission to make sure that everyone got fed.

  He smiled for the first time that day. He never really thought of himself as nurturing, yet there he was, providing meals and worrying about everyone else.

  Maybe that was why he had gotten into the protection business. Maybe it was his own gruff way of taking care of the world around him.

  Or maybe he just liked police work.

  When he was actually doing it, and not making deals with mass murderers in exchange for information.

  He finished the apple, tossed the core in the recycler, and rubbed his face one last time. The shower had only helped so much. If only he could scrub the last few hours from his brain, and keep the good things he’d learned.

  If only.

  FIFTEEN

  “SO,” MR. STUPID Llewynn (“call me Evando”) said as he sat in the captain’s chair in front of a fake window with a forest scene on it, “tell me why it’s so important to add the ‘Shindo’ to your name.”

  As if it were a whim, as if it didn’t matter at all, as if Talia was insisting on something stupid.

  She sat on the edge of the chair across from Mr. Stupid Llewynn. If she sat back, the chair would try to hug her or something. It had freaked her out yesterday; she wasn’t going to make the same mistake today.

  Before she tried to answer him, she looked at his office. Browns and creams, warmer tones than the waiting room, but still not real comforting to her. She really didn’t like this place, and she wasn’t exactly sure why.

  Or maybe she just didn’t like Mr. Stupid Llewynn. She hated fake people with fake emotions, and he seemed like one of those.

  Plus, he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was.

  “I thought we were finishing the entry interview,” she said.

  “We are,” he said. “But first, let’s talk about this insistence on your name. It’s different from your father’s.”

  She glared at Mr. Stupid Llewynn. “My mother’s name was Rhonda Flint-Shindo. She raised me until she died. She lied to me about my father. She said he didn’t want me. Instead, he hadn’t even known about me. So I keep the name because it’s mine now. No one else has that name. Just me.”

 
; “And to honor your mother?” he asked.

  “My mother ‘accidentally’ committed a major crime while working for Aleyd Corporation before I was born. When she finally had to face the ones she harmed, she committed suicide rather than take responsibility. She’s not someone you honor.”

  “But you loved her,” Mr. Stupid Llewynn said.

  “Yeah. When I thought she was just a mom. Then it turns out she’s a murderer and a liar and a coward, and I don’t love her anymore.”

  Another tear ran down Talia’s cheek. This time, she didn’t brush it because she hoped to hell he didn’t notice.

  His voice was soft. “You found this out three years ago? When you were thirteen?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “It’s a tough age to find out your mother isn’t who you think she is,” he said. “How did your dad find you?”

  Her breath caught. Jeez. Just in her history alone, there were things she couldn’t say.

  “He was on a case,” she said. “He found me. I can’t say more than that.”

  “Because of his secrets?” Mr. Stupid Llewynn said.

  Her dad had explained the conversation they’d had: that Mr. Stupid Llewynn had said that Talia could invoke her dad’s secrets for his job, and her own life-threatening secrets whenever she needed to. It was completely up to her.

  “He didn’t have to take me in,” she said. “He did. And he’s put up with me.”

  “Do you think he loves you?” Mr. Stupid Llewynn asked.

  She let out a half-exasperated sound, glad it came out first before she called him some kind of name.

  “What kind of question is that?” she asked. “I thought this was an entry interview.”

  “I’m trying to figure out what exactly you will need from us,” Mr. Stupid Llewynn said.

  And then he waited, as if she remembered the question (she did) and would eventually answer it.

  “Me and my dad are a lot better suited than me and my mom ever were. He’s as smart as I am, and hardly anyone else is. He really tries, and yes, God, he loves me. I don’t know why, because I’m a real pain in the ass, particularly right now when I can’t even help him—